Dean Makes Racial-Political History
The Black Commentator
Howard Dean's December 7 speech is the most important statement on race in American politics by a mainstream white politician in nearly 40 years. Nothing remotely comparable has been said by anyone who might become or who has been President of the United States since Lyndon Johnson's June 4, 1965 affirmative action address to the graduating class at Howard University.
For four decades, the primary political project of the Republican Party has been to transform itself into the White Man's Party. Not only in the Deep South, but also nationally, the GOP seeks to secure a majority popular base for corporate governance through coded appeals to white racism. The success of this GOP project has been the central fact of American politics for two generations - reaching its fullest expression in the Bush presidency. Yet a corporate covenant with both political parties has prohibited the mere mention of America's core contemporary political reality: the constant, routine mobilization of white voters through the imagery and language of race.
Last Sunday, Howard Dean broke that covenant:
"In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House. He did it in a shameful way - by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people.
"They called it the "Southern Strategy," and the Republicans have been using it ever since. Nixon pioneered it, and Ronald Reagan perfected it, using phrases like "racial quotas" and "welfare queens" to convince white Americans that minorities were to blame for all of America's problems.
"The Republican Party would never win elections if they came out and said their core agenda was about selling America piece by piece to their campaign contributors and making sure that wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few.
"To distract people from their real agenda, they run elections based on race, dividing us, instead of uniting us."
Dean's Columbia, South Carolina, statement is equal in political import to Lyndon Johnson's framing of the need for affirmative action, in 1965. Prior to Johnson's Howard University address, no sitting or potential President since Reconstruction had drawn the straight line that connects racism and poverty:
"Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences - deep, corrosive, obstinate differences - radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual.
These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression."
A defining moment
Not since Lyndon Johnson vowed to harness the power of the federal government to redress the historical grievances of Black America has a potential or sitting President made such a clear case against racism as a political and economic instrument - and even Johnson failed to indict corporate interests, or anyone in particular, for wielding race as a political weapon. Howard Dean points the finger straight at executive boardrooms, and directly implicates members of his own party in the coded conspiracy.
"Every time a politician uses the word "quota," it's because he'd rather not talk about the real reasons that we've lost almost 3 million jobs.
"Every time a politician complains about affirmative action in our universities, it's because he'd rather not talk about the real problems with education in America - like the fact that here in South Carolina, only 15% of African Americans have a post-high school degree."
At Howard University Lyndon Johnson established a muscular, principled, historically-rooted rationale for vigorous affirmative action as national public policy. Johnson then announced "a White House conference of scholars, and experts, and outstanding Negro leaders - men [sic] of both races - and officials of Government at every level. This White House conference's theme and title will be 'To Fulfill These Rights.'"
Johnson spent the better part of the next three and a half years forcing legislation through Congress to "fulfill" those rights, as broadly demanded by the Civil Rights Movement.
Bill Clinton - the ridiculously dubbed "Black" President - began his 1992 campaign by staging an ambush of Sister Souljah to impress white males, dedicated his second term to elimination of "welfare as we know it," and ended his tenure with a purposeless national "conversation on race" that went nowhere by design.
Howard Dean has taken history in his hands by hitching his ascendant campaign to a straightforward, anti-corporate message that does not pander to white racism. He presents whites in the South and elsewhere with the only principled choice they should be offered: to vote their interests, or vote for their bosses' interests (if they are lucky enough to have a job). Although corporate media called Dean's statement his "southern strategy," it is in fact the only position that holds out any hope for a national Democratic victory in 2004 - whether enough southern whites emerge from their racist "false consciousness" or not.
The December 7 speech is a clear and definitive break from the lethal grip of the Democratic Leadership Council, the southern-born, corporate-mouthpiece faction of the party. The DLC's favored presidential candidate is Senator Joe Lieberman, it's most illustrious personality is Bill Clinton, and it's most prestigious founding member is none other than - Al Gore.
Gore's endorsement of Dean should be viewed as head-swiveling proof of the bankruptcy of the DLC's white "swing voter" strategy. The DLC-Emeritus has effectively jumped ship.
Stay the course
Where does this leave Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich? Exactly as they are, preaching the same social democratic, anti-racist, pro-peace message as before, for as long as their energies can sustain them. Dean's political leap would not have been possible in the absence of Sharpton's energetic Black candidacy and Kucinich's principled, progressive white voice from the Left. At this historic juncture they dare not go anywhere. Dean has picked up the torch that Sharpton and Kucinich have been carrying and they must stay in the race to make sure he doesn't set it down. By persevering in pressing the Left edges of the Democratic envelope, the "Two Civilized Men" created the political space for Dean to make his historic break. Although we cannot expect either candidate to rejoice in the frontrunner's actions, Dean's leftward march is also their victory over the DLC, and they must defend it - against Dean himself and his newfound allies, if need be.
On the anti-war front, Dean continues to waffle on the nature and length of the Iraq occupation, which makes him an apologist for American Manifest Destiny. Kucinich and Sharpton are the only candidates who call for unequivocal withdrawal. Their job is by no means over.
Sharpton's singular mission remains the same as when he first declared for the presidency: to present himself as the Black candidate. African Americans are sophisticated, and understand the value of a demonstration; many will vote for Sharpton as a way to make the weight of their electoral presence unmistakably felt. A substantial proportion of Black primary voters will choose Sharpton over any white man, including one with a progressive racial platform - a good result under present circumstances, and one we expect in South Carolina, February 3. (South Carolina Black Rep. James Clyburn has endorsed his congressional colleague, Dick Gephardt.)
Only two people can shut the window that Howard Dean threw open for the national Democratic Party, last Sunday: Dean and Al Sharpton. Dean's Black advisors, especially Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., must caution the former Vermont Governor that their presence in his camp does not convey Blackness to the candidate. He must respect and acclimate himself to Sharpton's mission.
Sharpton must remember that he is not running for King of the Blacks, but is essentially acting as the lead Black organizer in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Dean's December 7 statement would certainly not have been written without Sharpton in the race. That is a great victory of the Sharpton campaign, one that may shape the future of the nation.
Indeed, Sharpton could have vetted Dean's speech, which reads very much like the distilled product of A More Perfect Union, the book written by Rep. Jackson and Frank Watkins, Sharpton's former campaign manager. The same river runs through it, the historical currents that also informed Rev. Jesse Jackson's speech to South Carolina State University at Orangeburg, last week.
"The big fight in this state should be trade policy and the Wal-Martization of our economy," said Jackson, the local Times and Democrat reported. "The challenge is to get South Carolina to vote its economic hopes and not its racial fears." Most low-income Americans are white and "they work every day. They work at Wal-Mart without insurance. They work at fast-food places. They work at hospitals where no job is beneath them, where they don't have insurance, so they can't afford to lay in the beds they make.
"The challenge for South Carolina is to move from racial battleground to economic common ground to moral high ground."
Those sentiments spring from the Black Political Consensus. Howard Dean is attempting to get the Democratic Party - and himself - in step. That's how history is made.
With absolute certainty that the corporate media have thoroughly misreported, mangled and incompetently framed Howard Dean's December 7 speech, we have republished it in full, below.
-From the Official Howard Dean Weblog, December 7, 2003
http://blog.deanforamerica.com/archives/002565.html